Apocalyptic Locas and Garbages of Eden: Travesti Trash Ecologies in La virgen cabeza
Join us for an interesting talk by Emi Frerichs, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Trans Studies in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at Illinois.
📅 Date: Monday, April 21, 2025
🕓 Time: 4:00 PM
📍 Location: Davenport 230
This talk demonstrates how the literary offers a critical framework for understanding travesti identity, history, and representation in the Southern Cone. Focusing on Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s debut novel La virgen cabeza (2009), Frerichs argues that the author’s reimaginations of the dystopian genre function as a methodology to challenge contemporary end-of-times discourse through the lens of travesti subjectivity. Centering analysis on the novel’s travesti protagonist, Cleopatra Lobos—who builds a refuge for the socially discarded out of refuse, Frerichs reads Cleo’s reconfigurations of trash as both an aesthetic and political tool, grounded in travesti architectures of community care. Mapping the novel’s resonances across a broader Southern Cone archive through a proposed system of travesti aesthetics rooted in filth, irreverence, and refusal, Frerichs contends that this challenge to the genre’s dominant narratives of resource scarcity and competitive survival becomes a vital site for reinvesting in travesti’s socio-political value—one that illuminates their innovative approaches to survival, kinship, and the imagining of a new humanity.
